The CES show floor just opened, and the chaos is real. Sift through it and you’ll find Panasonic has a gem hiding out in its massive booth. We’ve already been told 12930821321312 times that that 4K is here, and while the screens are, the stuff to watch is still sparse. But Panasonic’s new Blu-Ray prototype wants to make sure you can use every pixel possible.

26 November 2014

Yes, a Blu-ray copy of Police Story 3: Supercop was destroyed for the sake of science. It turns out that the nanostructure of Blu-ray disc makes them especially well-suited to soaking up light — exactly what you’d want with a solar panel.

11 September 2014

There’s just one thing that could make your drive to work less agonizing when the GPS is telling you there’s no way around the endless traffic: access to your Criterion Collection Blu-ray discs. Or at least that’s the scenario Panasonic is envisioning now that it’s including Blu-ray players on its satellite navigation units.

7 June 2014

The traditional way to display one’s collection of DVDs and Blu-ray movies is to whack them on a conveniently-positioned bookshelf, preferably in a public space where friends can admire your dedication to the slowly-dying medium of physical discs. But movies aren’t books. They should be on a movie-shelf. Or if it happens to be your collection of X-Men films, this glorious contraption.

5 May 2014

Stupid hipster 80s fetishism notwithstanding, cassette tapes don’t get much love. That’s a shame, because magnetic tape is still a surprisingly robust way to back up data. Especially now: Sony just unveiled tape that holds a whopping 148 GB per square inch, meaning a cassette could hold 185 TB of data. Prepare for the mixtape to end all mixtapes.

11 March 2014

As much of the world migrates its movie needs from optical disks to hard drives, a team of chemists from Spain found a new use for a regular old Blu-ray player. They turned it into a cheap but functional medical device that could help the third world.

1 December 2013

Hang on to your martinis, Bond fans. Amazon has a completely wackadoo 67 per cent off sale on the Bond 50th Anniversary Blu-Ray box set. That’s all 23 Bond movies for $US99. But it’s today only, so get moving!

18 September 2013

They say you can’t have your cake and eat it too, and if you want an ultra-thin lightweight laptop, you have to say goodbye to a built-in optical drive. It’s a minor sacrifice made even easier to tolerate now that Pioneer is introducing an external Blu-ray/DVD/CD burner that connects to your Mac or Windows computers over Wi-Fi.

22 June 2013

Now that its bigger brother Blu-ray has stolen the spotlight, paltry 4.7GB DVDs have slowly started to fade into obscurity. But could they be poised for a comeback? A trio of Chinese scientists have discovered a breakthrough process that could, at least in theory, allow a DVD to store a whopping 1000TB — or a full petabyte — of data. Suck on that, Blu-ray.

7 June 2013

They last a lot longer than the tape-based storage of yesteryear, but optical discs, particularly the type you burn at home, aren’t guaranteed to survive even a decade. So if you want to pass on that wedding video/holiday photos/copy of Caddyshack to your great-great grandkids, you’ll want to opt for Millenniata’s new 25GB Blu-ray compatible M-DISCs which are guaranteed to last at least 1000 years.